Point Break: a cult favorite, but not for the surfing.
Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext /Allstar Collection/20th Century Fox

At SXSW in Austin, Texas this year, US television channel TNT brought in a surfing simulator and created a “pop-up beach”
to help promote their surfing-meets-crime-family show Animal Kingdom,
the second season of which premiered on Tuesday. It’s just the latest
attempt from the worlds of television and film to embrace surfing with
some form of gimmickry. The 1977 world champion Shaun Tomson summed it
up like this when I spoke to him: “Fictionalized representations of
surfing have been trash.” So why has pop culture, on the whole, got it
so painfully wrong when it comes to depictions of surfing and surf
culture?

The canon of mainstream surfing pop culture begins with Gidget. The
film and TV series brought surfing – at least, the Malibu version of it –
to the US. Based on the real-life journals of Kathy Kohner Zuckerman,
it’s not as much about surfing as about a girl finding her place in the
world, but the setting and depictions of surfing caused America to fall
in love with if not surfing, then at least the idea of it.

A scene from Gidget Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images The go-to pick for when cinema almost got surfing right is John Milius’s Big Wednesday,
from 1978. Also set in Malibu, it is a look at the lives of a group of
friends against their relationship with the water. It’s heavy with
testosterone and features plenty of Gary Busey. The antithesis of Big
Wednesday was Point Break – Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991
surfing-meets-small-time-crime flick that was panned critically but went
on to have a cult following and an ill-advised remake in 2015. Films
such as Blue Crush and Soul Surfer followed in its wake and do manage to
capture realities of surfing, and do so with female leads. On the other
end of the spectrum is Matthew McConaughey’s Surfer, Dude – which
rather predictably for a film with a title that bad has a 0% Rotten
Tomatoes score. Another stinker was 2006’s Surf School, rated the 41st
worst movie ever on IMDb.

If Hollywood has had a hard time putting together a whole movie on
surfing, individual characters proved just as hard to get right. Sean
Penn’s Jeff Spicoli is a controversial pick among surfers. Some say he
furthers a negative stereotype of the stupid surfer. Others, with a
sense of humor and self-confidence, know that this character has a solid
basis in reality. Robert Duvall’s Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now
represents the closest you will get to a universal consensus in these
matters among surfers. We have all done dumb things to get waves.
Whether it’s punting relationships, ditching work and school, taking
ill-advised leaps off slippery rocks into heavy surf (or all of the
above at once), we all understand that character’s motivation. There is
some of Kilgore in all of us.

Surf’s up: Robert Duvall as lieutenant colonel Bill Kilgore Photograph: Allstar/United Artists On TV, Animal Kingdom is not breaking any new ground with its
depiction of low-life criminal surfers (see: Point Break). But in The
OC, Peter Gallagher’s Sandy Cohen was an anti-Spicoli: here was a
responsible, middle-aged father and heart-of-gold lawyer who also
surfed. Other shows such as John from Cincinnati, Hawaii Five-O and
Baywatch featured surfing, but it plays a bit part compared to shows
such as Gidget.

Surfing documentaries are where things begin to click into place and
use a solid formula: travel to exotic locales, film beautiful scenery,
take on personal searches for undiscovered waves and existential
meaning. Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer is the most revered, but there
are several documentaries which kill it. Bustin’ Down The Door
sticks out for both its success in charting the birth of the
mutlibillion-dollar modern surf industry and the Aussies and South
Africans who took on the Americans in Hawaii during the 1970s.

The Endless Summer - Trailer1 min. 23 sec.

The new docs pumped out by surf brands can be counted on for truly
stunning cinematography and the most progressive surfing. Anything by
the Malloy Brothers makes it in, and homemade fare from surfers such as
new superstar John John Florenceis worth checking out too.

When it comes to surfing literature, go straight to William
Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, a beautiful personal account of a life with
surfing from the New Yorker writer who first managed to sneak the sport
into the pages of the magazine. Dan Duane’s Caught Inside and Jim
Winston’s Breathe do full justice to the search and payoff as well.

Any
discussion of surf-influenced culture should rightly begin with John Severson, who died last Friday.
Severson founded Surfer magazine and is credited with also founding the
modern surf media industry. His painting, photos and films resonated
with surfers in a way, in the late 50s and 60s, they had never
experienced before. It served as a counterweight to Gidget and the beach
party films, at first, and the endless commercialization that followed.

If you seek to find out whether a surfing-related film or song or
photo is authentic, it occurs to me that the best standard relates back
to something Shaun Tomson said in his documentary. “I’ve been through
some tough times – surfing can make it better.” And if what you are
experiencing captures that in any way, then it captures surfing.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.